The question of euthanasia as a gentle and easy death stretches back to ancient times, but the demand for physician-assisted dying and active killing on demand of the incurably ill has only arisen since the end of the nineteenth century. The article describes the slippery slope from mercy killing to the annihilation of “life unworthy of living” in German science, society, and politics, and the economic and eugenic transformation of German psychiatry, which facilitated the mass killing of psychiatric patients and disabled people in Germany and the occupied territories during World War II. The different forms of euthanasia in the German Reich, from centralized to decentralized euthanasia, are analysed, as well as the expansion of groups of victims in the last years of the war. The article relies on empirical studies of the patient files of the centrally organized Aktion-T4, which was halted in summer 1941, and on the practice of decentralized euthanasia in the asylum of Eglfing-Haar near Munich in 1939–45. Special consideration is given to the relationship between the euthanasia programme as the first systematic mass killing during National Socialist rule and the genesis and practice of the Holocaust in Europe and the occupied territories. Not only the cooperation within the framework of Aktion-T4 but also the neglect, starvation, and killing with overdosed medication show how the mass killing of psychiatric patients camouflaged as “euthanasia” emerged within German psychiatric institutions themselves. The article closes with a brief examination of how the euthanasia crimes were dealt with after the war, and of the long-lasting neglect of the victims in German society and justice.
Gerrit Hohendorf (Wed,) studied this question.